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Today, after almost two years of work, we have the special pleasure of announcing the much awaited release of Xfce 4.8, the new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.6.

We hope that everyone will enjoy this release as much as we do. Sadly, this will not be the case as the folks using any of the BSD systems will notice a sudden loss of features. We think that this announcement is a good opportunity to express our disagreement with the recent “Linux-only” developments in the open source ecosystem, especially with regards to the utilities we need in desktop environments.

Xfce 4.8 is our attempt to update the Xfce code base to all the new desktop frameworks that were introduced in the past few years. We hope that our efforts to drop pieces like ThunarVFS and HAL with GIO, udev, ConsoleKit and PolicyKit will help bringing the Xfce desktop to modern distributions.

With Xfce 4.8 our users will be able to browse remote shares using a variety of protocols (SFTP, SMB, FTP and many more). The window clutter has been reduced by merging all file progress dialogs into a single one.

Our panel application has been rewritten, thereby improvingpositioning, transparency, item and launcher management. It also introduces a new menu plugin to view directories. Its plugin framework remains compatible with 4.6 plugins.

We also improved our settings dialogs. The display configuration dialog now supports RandR 1.2, detects screens automatically and allows our users to pick their favorite resolution, refresh rate, rotation. Screens can be configured to either work in clone mode or be placed next to each other. Keyboard selection has become easier and more user-friendly. Also, the manual settings editor has been updated be more functional.

Aside from the features implemented in Xfce, the 4.8 development cycle brought us a bunch of other goodies. For the first time we had a serious release strategy formed after the “Xfce Release and Development Model” developed at the Ubuntu Desktop Summit in May 2009. A new web application made release management a lot easier. We worked hard on improving the situation of Xfce translators which led us to setting up our own Transifex server. Something else you will hopefully notice is that our server and mirroring infrastructure has been improved so that our servers hopefully will not suddenly surrender shortly after this release announcement.

There is a lot more to discover and we hope a lot of you will give Xfce 4.8 a try! There is a brief tour online on

2011 has just begun and we are already planning for the future. The 4.10 schedule will be worked on soon and hopefully, we will be able to turn Xfce into a non-profit organization at this year’s FOSDEM, so stay tuned!

But until then we hope you will enjoy today’s release and join us in celebrating. Thanks go out to all our contributors, bug reporters as well as the awesome efforts of our translators and packagers.

Release notes for 4.8pre1

The Xfce development team is proud to announce the first preview release
for Xfce 4.8. Together with this preview release, the Xfce project
announces the feature freeze for the final 4.8 release which is set to
be pushed out to the world on January 16th, 2011.

This release incorporates major changes to the core of the Xfce desktop
environment and hopefully succeeds in fulfilling a number of long time
requests. Among the most notable updates is that we have ported the
entire Xfce core (Thunar, xfdesktop and thunar-volman in particular)
from ThunarVFS to GIO, bringing remote filesystems to the Xfce desktop.
The panel has been rewritten from scratch and provides better launcher
management and improved multi-head support. The list of new panel
features is too long to mention in its entirety here. Thanks to the new
menu library garcon (formerly known as libxfce4menu, but rewritten once
again) we now support menu editing via a third-party menu editor such as
Alacarte (we do not ship our own yet). Our core libraries have been
streamlined a bit, a good examplle being the newly introduced libxfce4ui
library which is meant to replace libxfcegui4.

Perhaps the most important achievement we will accomplish with Xfce 4.8
is that, despite suffering from the small size of the development team
from time to time, the core of the desktop environment has been aligned
with today’s desktop technologies such as GIO, ConsoleKit, PolicyKit,
udev and many more. A lot of old cruft like has been stripped from the
core as well, as has happened with HAL and ThunarVFS (which is still
around for compatibility reasons).

Thanks to the awesome Transifex translation platform, our language teams
have been able to update their translations at an incredible pace.
Please include them when praising this release!

A complete list of all changes since the latest stable release is
available on

Below you will find download information for Xfce4.8pre1. Please give
our mirrors a few hours to synchronize. We hope you will enjoy this
release, feel encouraged to blog and tweet about it! Feedback is welcome
in all forms. Bugs can be reported in our bug tracker as usual.
We need your help to make Xfce 4.8 our best release ever!

Kind regards and thanks to everyone who has contributed to this
release,

I haven't posted anything in a while, but I'm not complaining. The last month I've been mostly busy pretending to be busy. Ok, to be honest, that's not entirely true. Over at Xfce, we have achieved a lot in August:

We've moved all Xfce repositories (including the goodies) over to Git. Kudos to Brian for doing most of the work.

All Xfce translation updates are now submitted via Transifex. Thanks to the Transifex developers for all the support and for being such a friendly bunch. It amazes me that Dimitris, the founder of Indifex, is also active on our translations mailing list to support people!

The migration of the Thunar core to GIO is complete and has been merged into the main development branch. The overall delta was 2.9MB, although admittedly, a big part of that is due to the removal of ThunarVFS, so I can only take credit for about 16,000 of the 24,335 insertions and 6,000 of the 41,356 deletions.

Other things I've been planning to blog about but didn't have the time to:

Samuel is still busy setting up Buildbot. With less time than he had hoped for at hands this might still take a while.

I was provided with a free Linutop 2 in June. I'd like to thank the Linutop company again for this gift! So far, I've only found the time to give it a few test boots but I'm planning to set it up as a Xfce test machine soon. Its limited hardware makes it much better platform than my rather powerful laptop and/or virtual machines for testing the speed and memory demand of Xfce.

My thesis is progressing slowly. I think I have at least 3/4 finished now. I'll keep you posted about the result. I'm hoping to kick off the six month learning phase for my final exams before October because a friend of mine is already waiting for me. ;)

Last two weeks

I went to Barcelona and had a great time at the Ubuntu Developer Summit overall. Stephan and I were very productive. One evening during dinner we discussed our development and release process and later started writing it down. The result is a beautiful document that still needs a bit of polishing. I hope it'll serve as a good foundation for the development and release process of Xfce in the future. Several others commented on it and it looks like we'll give the proposed concept a shot after we've switched to git and all that.

Even though the week in Barcelona was great for Xfce, I was disappointed with how it went with regards to the cooperation between Xubuntu and Xfce. I talked it through with Stephan and after I got back, I resigned from my position as the Xubuntu Xfce4 Liaison.

At the moment

I've started to implement the so-called thumbnail management D-Bus specification. My implementation is called Tumbler and it will hopefully start serving thumbnails for other apps soon. I'm planning to use it in Thunar, Stephan has expressed interest in using it in Ristretto and when discussing the specification and the existing hildon-thumbnail implementation, Philip van Hoof told me that Hildon/Nokia might be interested in dropping hildon-thumbnail in favor of Tumbler if it's flexible enough. I'm working on it as much as I can and I'm hoping to do a release within the next few weeks.

I'm still working on the Transifex installation for Xfce. It's already running but I still need to import all the projects, releases and of course create accounts for maintainers automatically.

The migration of Xfce to Git is still work in progress. Brian has most of the repository issues sorted out and is now waiting for me to finish the commit mail script. I have two or three possible implementations lying around but I need to have a look at that again.

Jim needs the documentation repository next week, so I'm about to set it up.

Our Buildbot server has arrived in Sweden. Today I set up the firewall. Samual is taking care of setting up the Buildbot host VM and other things. We're considering to move a lot of the services not related to development (like the Xfce websites) into separate VMs on that server too, in order to make the current server a development-only machine.

Besides that I'm trying to catch up with the work and personal stuff that piled up while I was away last week. And I really should go and sleep.